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Monday, September 07, 2015

Exploring SEO: Long-Tail Versus Short-Tail

One thing that will be important when you are working on search engine optimization for your website will be that you make sure you are paying attention to all the little things that have to do with your keywords; of course, there are a lot of elements that go into the keywords you use - and into what will be positive and negative for your site - but one area especially worth paying attention to is that of "long-tail" and "short-tail" keywords.

Short-tail keywords are the keywords that websites target the most often, as these are the (often shorter) more common keywords that lots of people search each month; while "lots of searches" is certainly a good thing, one thing you should also realize is that - because of the fact that more sites use short-tail keywords - you will face more competition when you try to focus on a short-tail keyword on your site.

On the other hand, long-tail keywords are the (often longer) more specific keywords - the ones that focus on one aspect of a product or niche, rather than focusing on the niche as a whole - and while these keywords are not searched as often each month, they also do not face as much competition.

With these facts in mind, the question becomes whether you should focus on long-tail keywords on your site or on short-tail keywords - but the answer is not necessarily a simple one!

When it comes to short-tail keywords, the great thing is that you will bring huge amounts of traffic your way if you are able to get your site to the top page of search engine rankings, but in order to get your page there, you will need a lot of hard work and patience, whereas long-tail keywords will give you a much better chance of ranking highly, and you can even combine a number of long-tail keywords and generate just as many searches; if you have a "test" website you are willing to have patience with and experiment with, go with a short-tail keyword, but if you need results more quickly, realize that focusing on long-tail keywords can be a great approach!